Since its beginnings, American writing has been in…

Readers take in dialogue one thought at a time. A frequent mistake of beginners is to combine thoughts, which may be suitable for other…

— Sol Stein

For all forms, writing dialogue is almost like writing music. I pay close attention to rhythms and tones.

— Sefi Atta

There's a point I can get to where I start writing character and then through the dialogue, after all of this preparation, the thing…

— Charlie Kaufman

If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of…

— David Nicholls

Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas.

— Eric Hoffer

I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind…

— Kiese Laymon

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.

— William Zinsser

If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot…

— Jamaica Kincaid

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There…

— Hemingway, Ernest

My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

— Ishmael Reed

As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore…

— Tim Cahill

Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.

— Ishmael Reed

Clutter is the disease of American writing,

— William Zinsser

The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out.

— Arthur Miller

As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this…

— Ken Liu